On February 25 of this year St. Vincent released her fourth album, St. Vincent. Critically acclaimed upon its release, what makes this album so significant from a marketing standpoint is the immense success of its sales immediately following its release. In its very first week on the shelves, St. Vincent sold 29,506 albums - a significant increase from the first week sales of her last album Strange Mercy. While no single factor can take credit for the overwhelming success of St. Vincent, the digital marketing campaign headed by The Found Group deserves some special attention for the methods they used in this campaign.
The Found Group, a company that provides “integrated digital marketing campaigns…for the music industry” utilized their own web tool, found.ee to target and retarget pools of potential customers and fans. A currently exclusive service, found.ee uses a shortlink to track how fans have interacted with their advertisements and what content from an artist a fan has viewed. They then program these links so that fans will be redirected to new content and advertisements instead of the same repetitive content over and over again. By continually retargeting these pools, The Found Group is able to expose interested customers (those who have previously clicked on associated links) to new content by or about the artist. Since customers are more likely to purchase a product the more times they see it, this method of constantly retargeting fans and potential customers is very effective.
Directly targeting consumers based on their interest in a product is increasingly important.
In a day and age where the ads on our Facebook page directly relate to our search history and every advertisement seems to be grabbing our own personal attention, specialized and personalized advertising is becoming more prominent and, as exemplified by St. Vincent and The Found Group, more effective than ever. The found.ee tool is currently only available through The Found Group themselves and only to musicians, however I would expect to see it expand in the near future based on its proven success in delivering results.
Below is an info graphic explaining the digital marketing strategies for St. Vincent.
